at the still point of the turning world @epitaphes - Tumblr Blog

I am a person who has neither the strength nor the pride of a lion. I am soft like a fragile rib, but I have been filled with a secret inspiration.

Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard Von Bingen’s Mystical Visions : Translated from Scivias, translated by Bruce Hozeski.

doctors-star

highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.

#I had the death of seneca on the wall above my desk for years #for moral support

oaluz

“The past is already in debt to the mismanaged present. And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself. The past is already changing as it is being reexamined, as it is being listened to for deeper resonances. Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined future if you are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are willing to unleash its secrets.”

“I’m sure you have been told that this is the best time of your life. It may be. But if it’s true that this is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be the best, then you have my condolences. Because you’ll want to remain here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing you to remain.

One more flawless article of clothing, one more elaborate toy, the truly perfect diet, the harmless but necessary drug, the almost final elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic-all designed to maintain hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults, adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia. I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here, your choices of companions, of the profession that you will enter. You deserve it and I want you to gain it, everybody should. But if that’s all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these are indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.”

Toni Morrison, Wellesley commencement speech, 2004 (from here)

louisegluckpdf

in your 20s you must rediscover the joys of arts and crafts to stave off spiritual decay

#queue

diaries-of-despair

— August 5, 1966 / Susan Sontag, Journals and Notebooks

#queue

toiich

Isabelle Huppert, 1980

ratuszarsenal

dreams-of-a-moth

“My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty.”

— Charlotte Bronte talking about her sister Emily in “The Complete Poems Of Emily Bronte” (via adrasteiax)

catilinas

i am thinking about. the mysteriously multiplying number of wounds on mezentius’ corpse. and not paying attention to this lecture recording

catilinas

@marcvscicero @soulbelated

(the silence of vergil and the end of the aeneid)

#it's weird to see my old url

antigonas

— W. S. MERWIN, To the New Year.

#w s merwin #:')))#happy new year all!!

chthonic-cassandra

“She [Susan Sontag] mentions Henry James and his long winding sentences that withhold knowing. She maintains that knowing in James arrives only at risk. I would add that “to know” in Henry James’ novels is actually explosive, and that knowing inevitably turns on the sexual, the secret, the beneath, what is finally unspeakable. It is a knowledge that burns with a combination of terror and desire, which is why James’ circuitous style is essential to his material; it is a method of both necessary suppression and gradual, hard-won revelation. Sontag urgently wants her audience to understand why books that appropriate reality too quickly are deficient. They create a “spiritual triviality” that does an injustice to the rich complexities of life itself. She then launches her full-on critique of realism, a form that can create a “too easy sympathy” a “false intimacy” with the reader, an immediate, reassuring access to a text that leaves out mystery, transcendence, otherness, and what D. H. Lawrence called the “it” - that which escapes words.”

— Siri Hustvedt, “Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later” in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind